Creole language Totally Explained

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originates seemingly as a "new" language, sometimes with features that are not inherited from any apparent source, without however qualifying in any appreciable way as a mixed language. In the earliest days of modern creolistics, conceptions of creole genesis were largely developmental and creoles were uniformly assumed to be nativized pidgins culminating in Hall's (1966) notion of the pidgin-creole life cycle. Despite some opposition, a unified theory for explaining creole phenomena seemed at hand. However, efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far. The answer might be that creoleness is better described and referred to as a syndrome, a combination of phenomena seen in association with little inherent unity. In some cases, the modified source language might be the substrate language when warranted by a homogeneous substrate;. in other cases, the modified source language clearly is what creolists identify as the superstrate language; and in still other cases, no single source language might be identifiable. The same approach must be applied to identifying individual features as inherited or non-inherited and to distilling the defining grounds which separate creole languages from mixed languages such as Michif, especially when relexification is somehow claimed to be a moving factor.

History of the concept

Colonial origins

The term creole comes from Portuguese crioulo, via Spanish criollo and French créole. The Portuguese word crioulo is derived from the verb criar (to raise/to bring up), with a suffix of debated origin. The term was coined in the 16th century during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, in Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in Oceania.
The term "Creole" was originally applied to people born in the colonies to distinguish them from the upper-class European-born immigrants. Originally, therefore, "Creole language" meant the speech of those Creole peoples.
As a consequence of colonial European trade patterns, many creole languages are found in the equatorial belt around the world and in areas with access to the oceans. Such areas include the Caribbean as well as the north and east coasts of South America, western Africa and the Indian Ocean. The majority of creole languages are based on European languages with substratum elements from Africa, although some creoles (such as Sango) show little to no contact with European languages. The extent to which substratum features are significant in the genesis or the description of creole languages is a heated dispute.

Historical neglect

Because of the generally low status of the Creole peoples in the eyes of European colonial powers, creole languages have generally been regarded as degenerate, or at best as rudimentary dialects of one of their parent languages. This situation, incidentally, is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language," rather than a qualifier for it, so that one would say "a French creole" (rather than "a French creole language"), or "the Papiamentu creole" (rather than "the Papiamentu creole language").
Prejudice of this kind was compounded by the inherent instability of the colonial system, leading to the disappearance of creole languages, mainly due to dispersion or assimilation of their speech communities. Another factor that may have contributed to the relative neglect of creole languages in linguistics is that they comfort critics of the 19th century neogrammarian "tree model" for the evolution of languages and their law of the regularity of sound change by the earliest advocates of the wave model, Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt, the forerunners of modern sociolinguistics. This controversy of the late 19th century profoundly shaped modern approaches to the comparative method in historical linguistics and in creolistics.

Recognition and renaissance

Since the middle of the late 19th century, linguists have promulgated the idea that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages, and that those earlier labels are as inappropriate as saying that French is a "degenerate Latin" or an "Italian dialect". Linguists now use the term "creole language" for any language suspected to have undergone creolization, without geographic restrictions or ethnic prejudice.
As a consequence of these social, political, and academic changes, Creole languages have experienced a revival in recent decades. They are increasingly and more openly being used in literature and in media, and many of their speakers are quite fond and proud of promoting the usage. They are studied and standardized by linguists as languages on their own; many have already been standardized, and are now taught in local schools and universities abroad.

Classification of creoles

Whose creole?

By the very nature of the subject, the creoleness of a particular creole usually is a matter of dispute. The parent tongues may themselves be creoles or pidgins that have disappeared before they could be documented.
For these reasons, the issue of which language is the parent of a creole — that is, whether a language should be classified as a "Portuguese creole" or "English creole", etc. — often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of long-lasting controversies, where social prejudices and political considerations may interfere with the scientific discussion.

Substrate and superstrate

The terms substratum and superstratum are often used to label the source and the target languages of a creole. However, the meaning of these terms is only reasonably well-defined in language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon that language for another language (the superstrate). The outcome of such an event will be that erstwhile speakers of the substrate will be speaking a version of the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation (as in the case of Venetian and many other European non-official languages). Its influence on the official speech, if detectable at all, is usually limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords. The substrate might even disappear altogether without leaving any trace.
However, these terms are not as meaningful where the new language is distilled from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum. The substratum-superstratum continuum becomes outright awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed such as in Papiamentu or when the substratum can't be identified, or when the presence or the suvival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies. However, facts surrounding the substratum-superstratum opposition can't be set aside where the substratum as the receding or already replaced source language and the superstratum as the replacing dominant target language can be clearly identified and where the respective contributions to the resulting compromise language can be weighed in a scientifically meaningful way; and this so whether the replacement leads to creole genesis or not.

Shared features

Studies of creole languages around the world suggest remarkable similarities in grammar and a uniform development from pidgins in a single generation, thus lending support to the theory of a common origin. Critics, however, argue that examples are largely drawn from creoles derived from European languages, and that non-European-based creoles such as Nubi or Sango display fewer similarities, or that Creole French shows closer affinities with Koiné French. Bickerton's (1981) seminal work mainly purported to debunk the monogenetic theory of pidgins according to which, most European-based pidgins and creoles hail from a Mediterranean Lingua Franca via a broken Portuguese relexification in the slave factories of Western Africa.
   Considering creoles from European languages, the similarities in grammatical structure seem striking in Taylor's latest revision of the facts (1977:170-197), especially taking into account that they evolved in communities which were isolated from one another. However, as it is, the data is open to be reclaimed to abet the African substratum hypothesis of Michael Parkvall (2000) or is open to challenge with data from non-creole congeners besides being readable in a universalist perspective à la Bickerton. Particularly troubling is the evidence that definite articles are predominantly prenominal in English-based creole languages and predominantly postnominal in French creoles and French koinés (Fournier 1998). Moreover, as already noted by Whorf (1956), the European languages which gave rise to the colonial creole languages all belong to the same subgroup of Western Indo-European and have highly convergent systems of grammar to the point where they form a homogeneous group of languages he calls Standard Average European (SAE) to distinguish them from languages of other grammatical types. French and English are particularly close since English, through extensive borrowing, is typologically closer to French than to other Germanic languages. In the end, according to Vennemann (2006) most European languages might even share a common substratum as well as a common superstratum.
   This no doubt motivated Arends, Muysken & Smith to adopt in their (1995) introduction a four-fold approach to creole genesis:
� * Theories focusing on the European input

   * Theories focusing on the non-European input � * Gradualist and developmental hypotheses

   * Universalist approaches and to confine Pidgins and Mixed languages into separate chapters ouside their scheme.

Creole Genesis

1. Theories focusing on the European input

1.1 The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles

1.2 European dialect origin hypotheses

The French creoles are the foremost candidates to being the outcome of "normal" linguistic change and their creoleness to be sociohistoric in nature and relative to their colonial origin though some similarities with Hancock's domestic origin hypothesis are undeniable (Wittmann 2001).

1.3 Hancock's (1985) Domestic Origin Hypothesis and similar theories

1.4 Foreigner talk and baby talk

2. Theories focusing on the non-European input

2.1 The Cafeteria Principle

2.2 West-African substrate languages

3. Gradualist and developmental hypotheses

One class of creoles might start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes 1971) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others. The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech — syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation —tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's background.
   However, if a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it usually becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.
   Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. This doesn't mean that they always do. Tok Pisin, for example, was born as a pidgin and became a stable language after about 90 years. Once formed, creoles can remain as a sort of second, local standard, like the Cape Verdean Creole. Some creoles, like Papiamentu and Tok Pisin, have obtained recognition as official languages. On the other hand, some creoles have been gradually "decreolized" by conforming to a parent language, usually as a result of continuing political dominance, and have become, essentially, a continuum of dialects of the latter. This has happened a little in Hawai'i, and is one theory of the development of African American Vernacular English from Slave English.
   Creolization is the second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed language that's a creole language. This will be the mother-tongue for many people. The creolization process happens because people, especially children, using a pidgin develop native capacity (Noam Chomsky) in it, and its structure changes over time. It is a normal language with all the criteria a language needs. The morphology and syntax of the creole are richer than the pidgin's, its phonology has set rules, and the functions in which the creole is used are increased. The vocabulary will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable system (Wardhaugh 56-57).
   The post-creole continuum comes into being when the process of decreolization begins, namely, if a society has two official languages, a 'creole Y' and a 'standard Y' and the standard has a great effect on the creole. In this case speakers of the creole start correcting their language according to the standard. Then a large scale of varieties can be observed.

4. Universalist approaches

Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general process during the transmission of language from generation to generation and from speaker to speaker. The process invoked varies: a general tendency towards semantic transparency, first language learning driven by universal process, or general process of discourse organization. The main source for the unversalist approach is still Bickerton's (1981, 1984) work. His bioprogram theory claims that creoles are inventions of the children growing up on newly founded plantations. Around them, they only heard pidgins spoken, without enough structure to function a natural languages; and the children used their own innate linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language.

Recent currents and topics in creole studies

The last decade has seen the emergence of some new approaches to creole studies, namely the question of complexity of creoles and the question whether creoles are "exceptional" languages.

The creole prototype

If creole languages form a group which is different from other languages, they should have (a set of) features which clearly distinguishes them from "other" languages. Some features have been proposed, (by Bickerton for example), but no uncontestable creole feature has been found up to now. Many features that are said to be true of all (or most) creole languages are in fact true of all isolating languages. These features are then necessary but not sufficient to single out the group of creole languages from the bigger group of isolating languages. John McWhorter has proposed the following list (named The Creole Prototype):
* no inflectional morphology * no tone on monosyllabics * no sematically opaque word formation
The idea is that every language with these three features is a creole, and every creole has these three features.
These thesis has been attacked from two different sides:

David Gil argues that Riau Indonesian has all these three features, but is a natural language like any other. Riau Indonesian shows none of the sociohistoric traits of creole languages (slaves, mixed ethnic groups, plantations, colonial powers,...)

Many other linguists have adduced one or the other creole language which has one or the other of Mc Whorter's three features (inflectional morphology in Berbice Dutch Creole, tone in Papiamentu and others). Sources: McWhorter 1998, 2001, 2005, Linguistic Typology 5 2/3 (2001)

Complexity

Building up on this discussion, McWhorter has proposed that "The world's simplest languages are Creole languages" (ńot "Creoles are the simplest languages"). He claims that no non-Creole language will be found which will be less complex than a creole language. To this, David Gil replied that Riau Indonesian is precisely such a language, and that Riau is simpler than Saramaccan, the language McWhorter uses as a showcase for his theory. Jeff Good has shown that Saramaccan suprasegmental phonology is quite complex, but note that this doesn't disprove McWhorter's original claim. Showing that creoles can be complex doesn't disprove his hypothesis, it most be shown that a non-Creoles are simple. Sources: McWhorter 2001, Gil 2001, also http://www.uni-giessen.de/anglistik/ling/Staff/huber/cwindex.html

Creole exceptionalism

The lack of progress made in defining creoles morphosyntactically has led some scholars to question the value of Creole as a morphosyntactic theory. Chaudenson and Mufwene have argued that Creole languages are structurally no different from any other language, and that Creole is in fact a sociohistoric concept (and not a linguistic one), encompassing displaced population and slavery.
The idea of creole exceptionalism is spelled out by Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman in their influential book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988), where they claim that creole languages are an instance of non-genetic language change due to the Language shift without normal transmisson. Gradualists (see above) question the abnormal transmission of languages in a creole setting and argue that the processes which lead to today's creole languages are in no way different from the universal patterns of language change (Mufwene, Chaudenson, Croft).
Sources: Thomason&Kaufman 1988, Chaudenson 1992, 2003, Croft 2001, Mufwene 2001

Deconstructing Creole

Given that the concept of creole is disputed on both morphosyntactic and evolutionary grounds, some linguists have proposed abandoning that concept altogether, giving rise to publications entitled "Againt Creole Exceptionalism" or "Deconstructing Creole". Some creolists feel very uneasy about this, fearing that the whole field of creole studies would vanish (e.g McWhorter). On the other hand, the deconstruction only targets the linguistic component of creoles, and Creole history or Creole literature are not at stake.
Sources DeGraff 2003, Ansaldo et al (ed) 2007.

Mediterranean Lingua Franca

Lingua franca

Mixed languages

Creoles by main parent language

Arabic-based creole languages

Dutch-based creole languages

English-based creole languages

French-based creole languages

German-based creole languages

Malay-based creole languages

Ngbandi-based creole languages

Portuguese-based creole languages

Spanish-based creole languages

Dictionary

Creole Dictionary

from Webster's Dictionary

External results

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